Photo printing - onto furniture

You can get mugs, jigsaws, T shirts, albums - and now sofa cushions. Cloth UK is quite pricey - £60 for a cushion, £495 for a chair - but they print your photos onto a range of fabrics and make up the furniture too. They can also print onto tiles - £10 or £15 per tile depending on the size of tile. What a great way to get a mosaic, or to add a line of holiday photos to the edge of the bath. Can't find the tile design you want? Create it in Photoshop or Painter. The only pricing for fabric is the £180 wall hangings, but I'm wondering what an A4 size photo to stitch onto a shirt or a bag would cost. A Mount Rainier T shirt with our own Mount Rainier photos on... I like the personal side of technology; let's hope the price drops.

Hacking your vacuum cleaner: illustrated

I did a piece for DevReg on the iRobot Roomba interface that you can use to turn your vacuum into a frog(ger) or something a little more useful (new inventions are always used for military, adult entertainment or gaming - as iRobot has the military covered already, let's be thankful the hackers chose gaming rather than anything else to do with sucking). In the piece I mentioned what iRobot CEO Colin Angle thinks a dishwasher robot should do that a robot dishwasher can't. And someone at the Reg has come up with a rather fabulous illustration of the robot, washing away.

But Colin Angle is used to robots that are form-follows-function; he built Ghengis, the 6-legged walking 'cockroach' robot and the 'behavior-controlled rovers' that became Sojourner.

Hacking your vacuum cleaner

Tacky tie-in or savvy marketing?

Captain Jack fans beware; it's probably not really him sending you an IM. And I don't know how long it will be before the 'exclusive film clip' you get by working through the Dead Man's Tale adventure in the new Windows Live Messenger shows up on YouTube. You can skip the chatty skull and crossbones and download backgrounds, photos and icons - allegedly somewhere on http://get.live.com/messenger/overview after you download the new version of Live Messenger. But it's nice to see a game that's designed to be played with the person you're in an IM with. And there are pictures of Captain Jack on http://www.deadmanstale.com to look at while you install the software.

mmm. Pirates.

Snapping our camera reviews

sbisson and I wrote the first batch of reviews for ThinkCamera a while back but now that the site is live I can atually link to it.

Review Pentax Optio S6
Review Kodak EasyShare P850
Review Ricoh Caplio GX8
Review Fujifilm FinePix S5600
Review Fujifilm FinePix S9500

Hmm; some of those should really have Simon's name on ;-)